User blog:~Mana~/A new Era, a new start!
It feels like forever since I last did a blog post on the Wiki. Two years have passed by quickly, eh? Hello fellow contributors! It's nice to see you all still residing on the Wiki after all these years! For those of you who don't know who I am due to my elongated absence: I'm ~Mana~, the last remaining Bureaucrat here at Beyblade Wiki following the retirement of EdBoy3 and disappearance of DranzerX13. I've been a member of the community for five years, and I'm raring to get back into action here and whip the Wiki back into shape! As you may have noticed, the Wiki has undergone some changes today. I'll be sectioning this blog post to help you know when I've stopped each topic. (Yes, I have a lot to talk about. Wonderful.) New Theme & Homepage Today (August 9th 2015), the homepage and general theme were given a massive overhaul. The previous homepage was disorganised and was not updated frequently enough, so I've given it a minimalistic design focused on directly showing you the information that you're likely wanting to know. As a result of this, the Featured Article, Featured Media, Ask a Beypedian and On This Day sections have now been retired in favour of more focus on recent anime and manga content, and information on releases and characters. The general theme of the Wiki has also been revamped. Our previous background was extracted from the official Zero-G site and made good use of the signature fiery orange colour for the series. Similar to last time, we are now using a background extracted from the Beyblade Burst minisite, which utilises a blue theme based on the new mascot Beyblade, Valkyrie Wing Accel. It'll take some getting used to, but it suits the series well. In addition, we will also be looking into swapping out our existing wordmark for something closer to the current Beyblade Burst logo as well. These changes likely won't affect you on your day-to-day editing, but it does present visitors with a clean layout when they first arrive at the Wiki. New Templates Unfortunately, in the days of old, it was always an excessive amount of effort in the small amount of time we had to make it so that we had one central template for each type of article. As a result, you'll likely have noticed that we have separate infobox templates for just about every series going, which presents some inconsistency. And not even just that; we also have inconsistency in which templates we use: whether it's the modern tabbed BeyTemplate or the classic infobox style. We've never put enough effort into this to streamline things. This week, we will be introducing a few new templates designed to be used across all articles of each series. These templates will be streamlined to adapt to the needs of the article and will all have their themes controlled by one central template as well. This will allow us to make changes to templates with ease, and also bring a huge consistency across all articles. Which also leads me into... New Article Layouts As some of you may know, I also run B-Daman Wiki, which has received equally as much neglect from me, but was left in a more organised state than this Wiki was. Templates were streamlined, layouts were consistent, but that's because we had it easy. We were able to do that early on, and implemented features to allow this consistency to stay. I'm happy to reveal that I will be adding B-Daman Wiki's "New Page Menu" to Beyblade Wiki within the next week. Using the "New Page Menu", any contributor can choose a layout to import to an article that they are creating at that moment. The layout will still be editable and more headings could be added (though it's preferred that they aren't), but it provides users with fields for the information that we want in each article. The infobox, headings and opening paragraph context will all be imported, as well as categories and navigation boxes as well. We hope that this will help users in the future with their editing. Article Comments Reset This was something I had already done a month ago, but it's worth a note anyway. We had previously turned off Wikia's native Article Comments feature following abuse and spam, which was a shame as it's a decent feature; it allows users to communicate with each other about that article with ease, and doesn't require the creation of Forum thread or messaging individual people on their Message Walls. As of last month, all article comments were deleted, including the decent ones and ones made by administrators and staff. This was to allow the comments system to be reactivated with a clean slate and without any of the excessive spam that we previously had. These comments will be moderated as best as we can, and we hope that both editors and readers alike will respect each other when using this feature. New Administration Team? Yeah, you read that right. With EdBoy3's retirement and DranzerX13's disappearance, I am the sole surviving member of the administration team (yet I've still written this whole post using "we" and "us" out of habit). So that does indeed mean that we will be undergoing a recruitment drive for a fresh admins to help us moderate and be responsible for maintaining our community. But the question is, do you think you have what it takes? Each day, I'll be looking over edits to see which users interact with the community and care about the Wiki being made a better place again. I'll be looking at quality, not quantity in the edits. I'll be looking for helpful attitudes. I will not be looking for users who constantly cry "Can I be admin?" or anything else of the sort. If you apply to become an administrator on our application page and give valid reasons, sure. If you beg, think of it as decreasing your chances as opposed to increasing them. Remember, administrators aren't exactly "powerful". We're here to keep things in check and maintain the community, but we are ultimately editors, users, readers and Bladers just like everyone else. ---- So yeah, that about summarises everything for the Wiki this week. I will be around all week, on the Wiki and in chat, so don't hesitate to speak to me. I'll be trying to interact with people as much as I can. Let's bring Beyblade Wiki back to it's former glory! Thanks for reading! Category:Blog posts Category:News Posts